There is widespread use of household electric appliances (home electric appliances) nowadays, so that people's lives involve diverse home electric appliances. Such home electric appliances are currently operated all by their users. For instance, (i) a television is turned on and off or (ii) the set temperature for an air conditioner is changed, both by the user operating a remote control or the like for an individual home electric appliance.
For such an operation, the user needs to personally gather, from a sensor provided to an individual home electric appliance or the like, information such as (i) sensor information (for example, room-temperature information and humidity information) generated by the sensor and (ii) operation information on the individual home electric appliance, the operation information having been generated by that home electric appliance. In addition, the user needs to personally gather external information (for example, environmental information such as weather forecast) necessary to operate the individual home electric appliance.
Patent Literature 1, for example, discloses an electronic communication device that assists in electronic communication between a user and a personified agent by obtaining external, environmental information over a network, creating a message including information on the external environment, and outputting that message. This electronic communication device eliminates the need for the user to personally gather external information.